


This is How it is

by Annariel



Category: Primeval
Genre: Episode Tag, Gen, mention of canon character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-26
Updated: 2013-04-26
Packaged: 2017-12-09 13:22:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/774682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Annariel/pseuds/Annariel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the aftermath of Season 2, Cutter becomes obsessed with the security camera footage of his final confrontation with Stephen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This is How it is

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks are due to the ever lovely lukadreaming for beta duties.
> 
> This was written for the primeval_denial site art prompt challenge. The prompt is this [lovely set of gifs](http://wallflower18.livejournal.com/275968.html#cutid1) by wallflower18. She also made me the glorious header image.

  


Lester purposefully had the camera footage on a loop as Cutter entered his room, showing how it was. It was cheating ever so slightly since it would allow Cutter to guess what evidence Lester did and did not have. Lester privately hoped Cutter was alert enough to take the hint.

Cutter sat down listlessly in the chair. "What?" he asked.

That was the moment that he caught sight of the footage. Lester saw his back straighten. Cutter was suddenly sitting upright and alert.

"What's that?" Cutter asked, with considerably more animation than he had displayed since returning from compassionate leave.

"We need to talk about your last conversation with Mr Hart, here at the ARC." Lester resisted the temptation to shuffle the papers on his desk and watched Cutter instead.

"Does it matter now?" Cutter asked. His gaze returned briefly to Lester and then flickered involuntarily to the pictures on the screen.

"I'm afraid it does. I understand there were words." 

The rumours pervading the building suggested there had been more than words, but there was also a closing of ranks. Those who had witnessed the altercation clearly thought Cutter had suffered enough. Lester thought Cutter had suffered enough, frankly, but he had a duty to investigate the situation, and if he got proof that Cutter had indeed hit Stephen, then there would need to be disciplinary action.

Cutter frowned at him and Lester could almost see the cog wheels turning. Lester wondered if Cutter would choose to throw himself under this particular bus. Cutter's eyes moved back to the footage and he stared at it intently for almost five minutes. There was a long drawn out silence.

Lester coughed. Cutter started and looked at him.

"Would you care to give your side of the story?" Lester asked.

"Aye, there were words. I was out of line."

Lester watched him a moment and tried to decide if he was pleased that he still had no evidence, or disappointed that Cutter still didn't seem to realise how serious the offence was.

"You realise I can't allow you to bully staff, no matter how provoked you were," he said eventually.

Cutter flushed red. "It won't happen again."

"See it doesn't," Lester pursed his lips to indicate his disapproval but Cutter was already gazing at the camera footage once more.

"Can I have a copy of that?" he asked suddenly.

"No, you can't," Lester snapped. He couldn't think of a single use Cutter could have for it that wasn't morbid at some level.

Cutter frowned and seemed about to argue and then he shrugged. "Can I go?"

* * *

There is something truthful, Connor always thought, about security footage. Despite, or possibly because, the footage tends to be grainy, and is free of colour or sound, it strips everything down to its essentials. For instance, black and white films are classics, or at least all the ones you get to see are, which probably explained why black and white subtley suggested class and quality. Connor wondered idly, in between worrying about Cutter, whether he could write something on the subject for some blog or other.

Cutter had been watching Stephen's final moments in the ARC on a loop for the past four hours. Connor knew this because Cutter had had him pull the footage off the system and had then collapsed in the chair at Connor's workstation. This effectively made Connor homeless, or at least deskless. So he had spent the afternoon inventing jobs for himself around the ARC and returned to his station at roughly 15-minute intervals. Each time he returned he could see, over Cutter's shoulder, the stark images jerking past again and again.

_This was how it went._

For Cutter everything was always a matter of black and white. You were either with him or against him. If Connor was completely honest with himself, it was one of Cutter's most dangerous qualities, mitigated only by the fact that he was so frequently right.

The security camera was mounted in the long corridor outside the labs and observation rooms. The footage didn't show the fight but in Connor's mind's eye it was there nonetheless, in jerky black and white, taking place in between the frames that had been preserved. He wondered if Cutter was imagining it as well, while the footage looped. He wondered if Cutter was imagining might have beens.

Sometimes Connor was arrested in passing, drawn into Cutter's endless watch of the images. It was tempting to think that if Connor just imagined a might have been hard enough then something else would happen. The images would change. But they didn't because that is how it was.

_Cutter walked out of the room and past the open door where Connor and Abby could be seen, turning towards him in surprise and indecision._

Cutter had said, "Come with me Connor."

Connor watched himself moving forwards. Abby insisted that the group dynamics had been changing for months but in the clear black and white, it looked like a sudden shift. Cutter's movements said this is how it would be from now on.

Stephen disagreed with Cutter. They fought. Stephen was against Cutter and Connor was the new right-hand man. Connor watched himself fall in behind Cutter and wished he had turned right instead of left.

The images still didn't change.

What they didn't see, and didn't know, at least not until now, was Stephen watching them go. On the security footage his expression was difficult to read but Connor, watching Cutter watching those moments over and over again, read resentment, and resignation and an entire lack of surprise.

Stephen lived with Cutter's black and white for a long time. He knew how it was. He knew how it would be from then on.

_Then Stephen turned and walked away, dragging that last lingering glance with him. His eyes were the last part of his body to face down the corridor._

Connor imagined how it would look on paper if someone wrote it in a book. Stephen walked into the darkness, maybe, or Stephen descended into the pit of despair. Something like that.

But here was the thing.

_As Stephen walked away down the corridor he faded into the light. His dark shirt, a solid black when he was standing close to the camera, faded into grey._

It was hindsight of course. Connor's mind was creating symbolism where there was none. It was just a trick of the light. What happened between Stephen and Cutter wasn't some grand battle between light and dark, between black and white, it was just a messy personal tragedy in which there were no heroes. 

There were no heroes. But Connor knew that there were at least a couple of villains.

_Which was, of course, when Leek, as if on cue, stepped into the frame to gaze at Stephen's departing form, fading into the light. The way he gazed first at the departing Stephen and then at the departing Cutter made it look almost as if he orchestrated the whole thing._

Connor wondered if Cutter thought that, if the endlessly looping minutes were a search for someone upon whom to place the blame. Connor wondered if he, Connor, thought that too, but he felt washed out like there was no real capacity for blame left in him.

Besides it made no sense. The quarrel was of no especial advantage to Oliver Leek, though Connor wouldn't have put it past him to enjoy the chaos just for the sense of superiority it gave him.

But that was the way it was. Captured on film. The darkness and the light and the heroes and the villain.

Cutter's hand barely moved as he stopped the recording and rewound back the minutes.

Connor was not going to tell him he should go home, because all that waited for him at home was an empty house and the opportunity to brood somewhere Connor couldn't check up on him every quarter of an hour. Cutter glanced up, the mouse hovering over play. Connor turned and left before the loop could restart. He could have another cup of coffee before he tried to move Cutter; it wasn't like ten cups of coffee in a four-hour period was excessive or anything.

When he returned, 15 minutes later, he had Abby with him. He hoped she would do the talking but she hovered by the door and just gave him a significant look.

"Ummm... Cutter?"

"What!" Cutter barked.

Connor looked desperately at Abby who just nodded her head insistently. "About my desk," Connor began.

Cutter started and appeared to come to himself. "Sorry Connor, I forgot. Can you send me this?"

"Ummm..." Connor wasn't sure what to say.

"I don't think that's a good idea, do you?" Abby said.

Cutter looked at her. For a moment Connor thought he was going to yell, but then he shut his mouth.

"Aye, mebbe not."

Connor couldn't think of any words of comfort that weren't platitudes, and he certainly wasn't going to touch Cutter, not even for a gentlemanly pat on the back, so he just lurked awkwardly as Cutter's eyes went back to the screen.

Abby made an exasperated noise and stalked over. She unplugged the monitor which seemed a bit drastic to Connor but had the desired effect. The screen went suddenly black.

"I just wish..." Cutter said quietly.

"We all do," Abby agreed.

But that was how it was.


End file.
